Tag: Sonic Ranch

Video by William Ruben Helms

Lyric Video: moondaddy Shares Lush and Hypnotic “Great Expansion”

Founded and led by producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cara Potiker, San Diego-based dream pop outfit moondaddy traces its origins to the eerily uneasy quiet of the COVID-19 pandemic. And fittingly, the band embraces the age-old maxim that the only certainty in life is uncertainty.

With the release of 2023’s full-length debut, Poet Lies, moondaddy sees Poticker and her collaborators attempting to meet the haze of existence with a kaleidoscopic sound that provides peace, especially when all else feels like complete chaos. The album also saw the band quickly establishing a sound that drew from shoegaze, dream pop and trip hop that featured glistening guitars, gauzy synths and dulcet vocals singing dreamily poetic observations.

Since the release of Poet Lies, the San Diego-based dream pop outfit has gone on a sold-out tout with DeVotchKa and opened for the likes of Beabadoobee, Peel Dream Magazine and King Hannah. Building upon a growing local and regional profile, the band has headlined some of their hometown’s tastemaking venues, including The Casbah and others. 

The band’s sophomore album, the Manuel Calderon-produced Dove Tapes is slated for an October 31, 2025 release. Following upon last year’s Lightwave Lightwave EP, the San Diego-based outfit’s sophomore album may arguably be their most immersive and expressive effort to date.

Recorded at Tornillo, TX-based Sonic Ranch live to tape and mastered directly to lacquer by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering. While the core of the band is Potiker, Dove Tapes reportedly documents a maturing of the roles of her backing band — Patrick Heaney (drums), Robert Wren (bass), Gabriel Poissant (guitar) and Eric Coughanor (cello).

The album will feature the previously released, Beach House-like “Bystander,” which was released earlier this year, and the album’s second and latest single “Great Expansion.” Anchored around a propulsive rhythm section and a shimmering and looping guitar figure, “Great Expansion” continues to showcase the album’s overall gorgeous and hypnotic sound while serving as a lush bed for Potiker’s expressive, Victoria Legrand-like vocal. And much like its immediate predecessor, the new single also continues the album’s overarching thematic concern, with Potiker working to make sense of heavy forces both internal and external, including confrontations with a former friend, a brutal breakup and global events. But more specifically, the song serves as a universal love song, that sees its narrator looking back on a relationship lost to time.

“When I thought of the title, I pictured a dove carrying an olive branch,” Cara Potiker explains. ““I’m committed to creating little microcosms of love, despite what’s happening in the world. That’s what art facilitates, and what we all need to keep doing.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: San Diego’s moondaddy Shares Gauzy “Bystander”

Fronted by producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cara Poticker, the San Diego-based dream pop outfit moondaddy traces its origins to the eerily uneasy quiet of the COVID-19 pandemic. And as a result, the band embraces the age-old maxim that the only certainty in life is uncertainty.

With the release of their full-length debut, 2023’s Poet Lies, the project attempts to meet the haze of existence with a kaleidoscopic sound that provides peace — especially — when all else feels like chaos. Poet Lies saw the band quickly establishing a sound featuring glistening guitar, gauzy synths and dulcet vocals singing dreamily poetic observations while drawing from sheogaze, dream pop and trip hop.

Since then, the San Diego-based dream pop outfit has gone on a sold-out tout with DeVotchKa and opened for the likes of Beabadoobee, Peel Dream Magazine and King Hannah. Building upon a growing local and regional profile, the band has headlined some of their hometown’s tastemaking venues, including The Casbah and others.

Last year’s Lightwave Lightwave EP laid the foundation for what may arguably be the band’s most immersive and expressive effort to date, their sophomore album Dove Tapes, which is slated for release later this year. Both Lightwave Lightwave EP and Dove Tapes was produced by producer/engineer Manuel Calderon at Tornillo, TX-based Sonic Ranch and recorded live to tape. The material was mastered directly to lacquer by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering.

Dove Tapes‘ first single “Bystander” is a lush, breathtakingly gorgeous tune that seemingly recalls a synthesis of early 90s shoegaze and Beach House with swirling and glistening, reverb soaked guitar textures, gauzy and atmospheric synths and skittering and shuffling beats serving as a dreamy bed for Poticker’s remarkably Victoria Legrand-like vocal. Throughout “Bystander” expresses a woozy, desperately yearning lovesickness that’s both frustratingly unfulfilled and unrequited.

Directed by Sylvie Lake, the accompanying video for “Bystander” is fittingly a hazy and kaleidoscopic, half-remembered dream that’s just out of reach.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Protomartyr Shares Tense and Uneasy “Elimination Dances”

Detroit-based post-punk outfit Protomartyr — Joe Casey (vocals), Greg Ahee (guitar), Alex Leonard (percussion), and Scott Davidson (bass) — have become synonymous with caustic, impressionistic assemblages of politics and poetry, the literal and oblique over the course of five albums — 2012’s No Passion All Technique, 2014’s Under Color of Official Right, 2015’s The Agent Intellect, 2017’s Relatives In Descent and 2020’s Ultimate Success Today.

Protomartyr’s sixth album, the Greg Ahee and Jake Aron co-produced, 12-song Formal Growth In The Desert is slated for a June 2, 2023 release through Domino Recording Co. Although the band’s Joe Casey had a humbling experience staring at awe-inspiring Sonoran rock formations and reckoning with his own smallness in the scheme of things during the recording sessions at Tornillo, TX-based Sonic Ranch, the album’s title isn’t necessarily a nod to the sand and sun-blasted expanses of the southwest. Detroit or anyplace else on Earth can be its own desert. “The desert is more of a metaphor or symbol,” Casey says, “of emotional deserts, or a place or time that seems to lack life.” The desert brings an existential awareness that is ultimately internal.

The “growth” referenced in the album’s title came from a period of profound, life-altering transitions for the band’s Casey, including the death of his mother, who struggled with Alzheimer’s for 15 years. Now, 45, Casey had lived in the family home in northwest Detroit all his life. In 2021 though, a rash of repeated break-ins signaled that it was time to move out. Protomartyr’s music — this time more spacious and dynamic than ever before — helped pull Casey up. “The band still being viable was very important to me,” Casey adds, “and it definitely lifted my spirits.”

Having long served as the band’s unofficial musical director, Greg Ahee knew what Casey had been going through and the challenges he’d been processing, and as he was conceptualizing the music, he thought about how to make it all “like a narrative film.” The cinematic sensibility also manifest itself in Casey’s song-as-story-like lyrics, which see him critiquing ominous techno-capitalism, processing aging, the future and the possibility of love. But the underlying them as Casey describes it, is a testament to “getting on with life,” even when it feels impossibly hard.
 

Post quarantine, the band regrouped with an understandable sense of uncertainty, questioning if and how to continue after the turbulence of the past few years. They found themselves channeling that ambivalence to hone a song they named after a chapter from a 1950’s teen dance manual. “Elimination Dances,” Formal Growth In The Desert‘s second and latest single refers to a game where “‘you get tapped out when you lose the dance,” and that felt an apt metaphor for just surviving. “Life is a struggle, but “you might as well keep dancing until the tap comes,” Casey says.

Fittingly “Elimination Dances” is a cinematic yet tense and uneasy waltz built around rolling and propulsive drumming, angular and wiry bursts of guitar and a sinuous bass line paired with Casey’s urgent, snarling delivery. The song partially recounts Casey’s experience feeling small in the vast and indifferent desert, the existential acknowledgement of time and the struggle to survive with your dignity and wits intact.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Marfa, Texas’ Wilderman Releases Trippy, Random Generated Visuals for Polyrhythmic, Hook Driven New Single

Marfa, Texas is a small and extremely remote Western Texas town, a short distance from the American-Mexican border, and unsurprisingly the town is about as far as one can get  — both metaphorically and literally — from the costal tech capitals. Singer/songwriter Rob Gugnor and his partner Simone Rubi relocated to Marfa in 2013, where the y started a decidedly lo-fi cafe Do Your Thing, where the patient customer will reportedly be rewarded with some of the finest coffee in the Southwest; but perhaps more important to this site, Gugnor is known as the creative mastermind of the Marfa-based recording project Wilderman. 

Ironically, despite Gugnor’s  geographical and physical remove from the major tech capitals, his recently released Wilderman album Artifice deals with the increasing and confusing rift between lived experience and its digital approximation. As Gugnor explains at length in press notes:

“I started this record 5 years ago, seeking to explore the impact of technology on our psyche and the new human experience. Since beginning this process, I’ve found more value in the time away from screens, but I’m starting to view it as a luxury. Screen time is unavoidable now. Social media numbers are important. We can’t opt out of the game. In this time span, we’ve seen how information can be manipulated for our feeds. Digital perception has relativized everything to the point of insanity. Empathy is nearly impossible. K*vanaugh, Tr*mp, Milo Whatever His Name Was, digital bullying, flat-earthers. Life is now lived in the digital space. Identity and truth are shapeshifting and amorphous.

I would like to say that I found some hope in digging deep into the digital, but I’ve actually become complacent, and I think we all have. I was hoping to be a whistleblower, but it will mostly fall on deaf ears. We are in a stadium full of people, screaming to be heard. And yet everyone has headphones on and screens up, filtering through the noise to only consume the content they curate for themselves. Art is content. Tragedy is content.

But I still dream that we can remember ourselves, empathy, the human touch – it’s in the songs.

I hope that this album will somehow lead the listener back to a version of themselves that’s in the here and now, without comparison to others, without self-judgment.

It’s a mirror that can also be a gateway to another reality, the one we used to live in.”

Gungor and a backing band featuring some of Marfa’s best musicians — Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, The Brilliance’s John Arndt, Gungor’s Grammy-nominated brother Michael, Midlake’s McKenzie Smith Jeremy Harris, and Andrew McGuire, along with engineer Hugo Nicholson, who has worked with Radiohead, Father John Misty and Primal Scream decamped to Sonic Ranch, a studio in the Chihuahuan Desert, just outside the border town of Tornillo, to start the jam sessions that would eventually turn into the material on Artifice. Chosen in part, because important records by Animal Collective, Beach House, The Mountain Goats, Swans and others were recorded on their premises, the album sonically is influenced by the work of David Byrne and Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Paul Simon’s Graceland and Donald Judd’s permanently installed works. Unsurprisingly, Remain in Light and Graceland were used as a blueprint with live improvised material being recorded with the idea that Gugnor would later recombine and rearrange these sounds into fleshed out songs. It’s a decided and radical change in sound and songwriting approach from his 2013 Wilderman debut Learn to Feel, which was recorded completely in an analog fashion.  

The album’s latest single “Cog” is a funky, polyrhythmic, sinuous hook-driven jam centered around a looped, shimmering guitar line, a buoyant bass line, shimmering and sharply arpeggiated synths — and while recalling Fear of Music and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel 3, Security and So-era Peter Gabriel, the song is rooted in the current sociopolitical moment, suggesting that technology has caused us to lose our humanity to the point that we’re cogs in a larger, economically driven machine that will destroy us all. But throughout the song’s narrator is demanding that we resist it, that we remember and honor the individual moving to the beat of their own drum.

The accompanying visuals are the result of a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks — in this case, a random number generator came up with imaginary celebrities that look like real ones. What’s real and what’s digitally generated? Is it your memory or a distortion? It’s trippy and disconcerting.